/m/park_factors

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Or maybe because you've proven you will swing at anything, there is no reason for a pitcher to throw you anything good to hit, so it's hard to hit many...no, no, it's obviously the ballpark. Just keep going down that road.

They why did KC pitchers give up the most walks in the AL in 2011?
3rd most in 2012?
most in 2009?
???

Come on Dayton answer that one
:-)

The Royals do not draw many walks because for most of the past decades you have a bunch of undisciplined hitters who don't exactly punish pitchers for throwing strikes in any ballpark...
Your pitchers walk a lot of batters because they suck.

4 decades???? The last time the Royals had legitimately good team- 1989 or so- the Royals drew an average/above average # of walks
In the Royals heyday of the late 70s the team drew a decent amount 0f walks

There are several factors that affect walks, but I doubt the ballpark has much to do with it. Major factors roughly in order of importance:
1. How often a player swings at pitches not in the strike zone. I think this has to be the biggest factor since walks are drawn by not swinging at pitches out of the zone.
2. How often a player swings and makes contact with any pitch. Players who put the ball in play early and often won't be walking very much, while guys who take pitches or swing and miss get deeper counts and hence more walks and strikeouts.
3. A player's power. Power hitters and top hitters in general get "pitched around" more often and hence get more walk opportunities. For truly elite hitters, IBBs become significant as well.
4. Lineup placement. Hitting 8th in the NL or just having a bad hitter behind you leads to some IBBs, and to a lesser extent, getting pitched around.

Intuitively, I'd say that factor 1 dominates all the others, but I've seen enough to convince me that factor 2 is almost as big. When I watch guys like Robinson Cano and Ichiro (back when he was good) hit, I see a guys with pretty good at laying off pitches out of the zone, but they're so good at making contact that they have low walk totals. Comparatively, Adam Dunn, even in his prime swung at many pitches out of the zone, but since he didn't put them in play and took so many pitches in general, he still put up very good walk totals.

Snark aside, I really wonder what Dayton Moore is trying to accomplish with these comments. Is it as simple as him offering his honest opinion? Is he trying to deflect blame from players? Is he giving himself an excuse for the team's performance?

When pitchers come here, they have the mindset to use that park—put the ball in play, throw strikes, attack the zone.

Here's what I don't quite get though. Pitchers have this mindset. But the Royals mindset is also to put the ball in play. They have said "home runs kill rallies" and that the way to score runs it to hit a lot of doubles. So the opposing pitchers are doing exactly what the Royals hitters want them to do, right?

So pitchers are serving it up to induce contact. And the hitters aren't trying to hit it out or walk, they're just trying to put the ball in play. And Kauffman while it does depress home runs, gets more doubles and triples than most parks. So you have all these factors at play that are conspiring for the Royals to be a great team at getting singles and doubles.

And yet they are ninth in overall hits and twelfth in doubles. How do you explain that away Dayton?

I'm trying to reconcile these comments with Jack Maloof's. (Maloof explaining how Kaufmann screws up swings when players try to hit homers.)

Maloof did get fired after the comments but the team was on something like a 4-18 streak. So I'm not sure him being fired was because of those comments directly or because the team needed a scapegoat during an awful stretch of baseball. But the fact that Maloof was so open about the comments made me think that he probably wasn't the only person in the organization that felt that way. Maybe it was just him. But it is pretty rare for a hitting coach to talk to the media in the first place. And when they do talk, it's even more rare to say that the team can't do something (hit homers) that is so fundamental to what you should be teaching. For him to feel comfortable making those comments seemed to suggest to me that there were a few in the organization that felt that way about the stadium.

And now when you see Moore saying these comments, I really wonder if there is an organizational philosophy that Kaufmann is just too difficult of a ballpark to produce good hitters.

I call BS on this for one reason: Wrigley Field has less foul ground than most parks, and the Cubs are also annually at the bottom of the list in walks drawn. Are the same pitchers who are giving guys more pitches to hit in big parks also giving them more pitches to hit in small parks?

How about: it's an organizational philosophy, and not a particularly good one given how successful the Royals and Cubs have been in the last 25 years.